Not every adolescent who is bullied will become depressed. Some are better able to cope with the stresses of it than others, and for humans one important mitigating factor is the presence of allies and friends. Jaana Juvonen, an adolescent bullying expert at UCLA, puts it this way: “The power of a friend is incredible. A kid with just one friend [has] a lower risk of getting victimized, getting bullied in the first place. Moreover, the distress of the victim is alleviated when they have that friend.”
Höner confirmed the same is true for hyenas. “The number of friends you have will ensure you keep your social status,” he told us.
Shrink’s early life was defined by his lack of advantage. But after observing Shrink interacting with other hyenas in the communal den, Höner and his team started seeing something interesting. Shrink was especially good at something called “social coalition walking,” the hyena version of inviting a friend for coffee or a pickup game of basketball. More colloquially, this winning hyena behavior is known as “friendship walking.”
As Höner described it to us, “two males meet and somehow decide, ‘Let’s go on a little excursion together.’ ” Höner’s voice had a smiling tone, almost affectionate, as he explained how Shrink would approach other males, and then the two would trot along together, their bodies touching, tails up in the confident position. Every few meters Shrink and his friend would stop and sniff a grass stalk attentively, even if nothing interesting was in fact to be seen or smelled. Sniffing during a friendship walk is hyena small talk, like commenting about the weather or sports or politics just to be sociable. Hyena friendship walks can last several hours, with the two animals stopping every so often for these sniffing conversations. The behavior is seen in adult hyenas as well—in fact, it’s one of the main ways that adults preserve their social bonds. Doing a lot of it in adolescence, as Shrink did, sets a young hyena up for an easier social time later.
His skill at hyena friendship, his ability and willingness to invite other hyenas out for some bonding, served Shrink well. Höner hasn’t looked into why it’s easier for some animals to initiate this behavior than others, whether because of personality, temperament, or opportunity. But one thing is clear: learning to attract friends and maintain friendships during wildhood is vital, and it isn’t automatic. Adolescents must practice having friends, repeating the give-and-take that underlies attachments. Particularly important are peer-peer relationships that don’t have kin bonds to cement them. And they get this exposure by practicing on one another—through play.
STATUS IN PLAY
Nature is a giant playground, with young animals from fish and reptiles to birds and mammals romping and cavorting in rivers, meadows, oceans and skies. Karl Groos, a German philosopher and psychologist, proposed in an 1898 book that “Animals cannot be said to play because they are young and frolicsome, but rather . . . in order to . . . supplement . . . individual experience in view of the coming tasks of life.”
While Groos’s description takes some of the fun out of play, the “coming tasks of life” are indeed embedded in the play behaviors of many animals and humans. Young predators mimic hunting, practicing the stalking, pouncing, and clawing they’ll need to feed themselves one day. Typically, these behaviors are encouraged by parents who bring “toys” to their offspring: injured penguins for young leopard seals and incapacitated scorpions for young meerkats, for example.
A wild African cat called a serval engages in “angling play,” according to ethologist Gordon Burghardt. The serval will allow “captured mice and rats to escape under a tree stump or hole and then try to retrieve them with a forepaw . . . the serval picks up the prey cautiously by the back fur, carries it to the vicinity of a crevice, lets it run if the prey animal still doesn’t slip into the hole, and the serval often pushes it in with its forepaws in order to be able to fish it out again.”
Adolescent killer whales play at beaching themselves, mimicking adults who ride waves up onto the sand to nab prey and then slip back into the sea. Orcas who receive this training when they’re adolescents appear to become better adult hunters, and their skills develop faster.
Similarly, courtship behaviors, which we’ll discuss more in Part III, are critical for adolescents to learn early in order to interact appropriately and successfully with mates later in life. For bald eagles, whose pre-mating rituals involve a harrowing, sometimes fatal whirling sky-dance called the death spiral, play behavior involves adolescent eagles flying toward each other and touching toes—real-time, in-flight, aim-and-grab practice in preparation for when they will clasp their partners’ feet and fling each other around.
One of the easiest play behaviors to identify is play-fighting, such as stylized boxing in kangaroos or head-butting in young rams. Australian wombats and tiger quolls chase, stalk, and wrestle one another. Red-necked wallabies have twenty-one different play-fighting actions, including skipping, grabbing, pawing, sparring, and kicking.
To a human viewer, play-fighting may look like practice for future self-defense against predators. It may seem to be preparation for staying safe. But actually, self-defense and play-fighting aren’t really the same thing. Play-fighting prepares young animals for a different kind of combat: the battle for rank within their own groups. It is noteworthy that young animals from guinea pigs to capuchin monkeys who engage in lots of rough-and-tumble play with their peers when they’re young don’t become belligerent fighters. They become better friends. They fare much better in social hierarchies as adults. Play allows younger animals to try negotiating conflicts without harm. Additionally, subordinate animals can learn to communicate when they don’t like what the dominant is doing.
As University of Massachusetts Amherst biologist Judith Goodenough puts it, “Without experience in a dominant role, young monkeys may grow up to be overly submissive, and without experience in the submissive role, they may grow up to be bullies. Play-fighting also may help a juvenile learn to read the intentions of others. Is the opponent bluffing? How motivated is this opponent? These social and cognitive skills may in fact prove to be more important than physical skills.”
We asked Höner if Shrink learned this lesson, and he said that all hyenas have to learn the two sides of a play-fight—even alpha females. Queens, he pointed out, sometimes intrude into other clans’ territories. There they are the interlopers and must be submissive to other residents of the territory. “Any hyena knows how to show submissive signs. That’s a key to survive. If you don’t do that, you get beaten up very badly,” he said. And many of those submissive signs are learned in early wildhood during play-fighting with peers.
Young male white-tailed deer spend summers together in mixed-age groups essentially “playing”—learning and relearning the rules of group living. At the start of summer males of all ages shed their antlers. Coming together as a group gives them more eyes and ears for protection from predators during this vulnerable, antler-less time. It’s also the deer equivalent of leaving their guns at the door. Play-fighting is less injurious if no one is wearing their weapons.
The purpose of play-fighting in these deer—and in many other animals—isn’t just to prepare to fight off predators or compete with one another for resources or mates. Its hidden purpose is to teach them how not to fight one another. Because that’s what stable animal groups do: they don’t fight. Play-fighting trains young animals to understand different positions within a social hierarchy. And that can make them more flexible and effective leaders later in life, as well as more productive, secure members of their chosen groups.
For social animals, there’s no substitute for this vital training. Human adolescents and young adults have a lot of options to practice the constant sorting and re-sorting of hierarchies. Organized sports, theater, and music can allow status-shifting in supportive environments based on specific skills—rather than on dominance contests of looks, size, strength, or family networks. They enable adolescents to move around a hierarchy with a modicum of control over what happens. Smart coaches and choreographers and conductors will give their players chances to star as well as opportunities to support.
Creating smaller hierarchies within a bigger hierarchy is an excellent strategy for surviving the sorting wars of human adolescence. Being a lower-status individual in a group can be an important and maturing experience. Internships and apprenticeships are examples of this, as are peer leadership relationships between, say, a ninth-grader and a nurturing twelfth-grader. But enjoying higher status in a different group is also educational. Becoming a member of multiple groups in schools, in local communities, and even online serves two equally important purposes: It builds adolescent social skills. And it makes the challenges of this phase more tolerable.
Given how physical animal play is, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether the virtual play of modern human teens is a proper substitute—or analogue—for the head-sniffing, antler-rubbing, tag-and-reverse, and coalition walking shown by deer, monkeys, elephants, and hyenas. For animals, physical contact seems to be key for the kind of socializing that prepares them to have friends as adults. Multiplayer video games aren’t as physical, but they do encourage adolescents to spend time getting to know other people, sometimes around the world. Often gamers occupy a variety of positions within the virtual-world hierarchy of a game. The video games played with others—distinctly different from ones played alone—are fundamentally social experiences, and many gamers say they provide the same collective benefits as in-person play. New research confirms that video gaming isn’t necessarily socially isolating. However, other studies suggest that, as one would suspect, chronic gaming does have a negative impact on the development of social skills. In adolescents addicted to video games, social skills including cooperation, accountability, altruism, and the ability to express feelings are reduced.
Wild adolescent animals have two advantages over their modern human peers. While they too face high-stakes tests and the stress that goes along with them, these periods of assessment start and stop. There are seasons to play and seasons to breed and seasons to migrate. But today’s human adolescents on the other hand are never given a break. With internet-fueled social media, there is no off-season.
In addition, wild adolescents have their competition right in front of them. Shrink didn’t have to prove himself to his clan members by day and then at night contemplate his relative rank to the eight other clans in the Ngorongoro, the dozens of clans nearby in the Serengeti, and all the other hyena clans in parks and zoos in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. He didn’t have to ponder what life would be like as a jackal instead, or a hunting dog, wolf, or leopard seal.
A young human on social media never has the full picture of their competition—and yet they never fully escape it. Modern social networks are too vast to know everyone in them. That can make distant celebrities or politicians, whether menacing or friendly, seem to be nearby, when in fact their dominance or prestige has nothing to do with one’s own daily real life. This is not a completely new problem, of course. It has grown with cities, better communication, radio, and TV. The internet hasn’t created competition among hypersocial, self-aware humans. But social media has expanded the number of peers that adolescents may stack themselves up against to unprecedented levels.
Comparing oneself with others isn’t a uniquely human habit. Remember that the Social Brain Network (SBN) helps animals process, decode, and act on social information. A crucial function of the SBN is to help an animal assess itself relative to others. But this system evolved in animals experiencing not constant, but periodic, assessments. In modern human life, the assessment has become perpetual, and it often starts well before wildhood is even under way.
For many, adolescence has become a tyrannical, nonstop sorting, rating, and ranking tournament. Middle school—the initiation arena—has become a relentless assessment zone where ratings are given for every aspect of adolescents’ physical and emotional lives: body type and fitness, sports ability, eating choices, sexual expression and experience, social adeptness, academics, outgoingness, material possessions, and general appearance. These have eternally been the concerns of younger adolescents, but never before has a culture provided them with such continuous and public measuring tools.
After a full day of assessment from peers, teachers, parents, professors, bosses, and mates, students go home. Home used to exist as a sort of status sanctuary. But now, through laptops and phones, a direct sorting pipeline digitally spews into many adolescents’ bedrooms, dinner tables, and car rides, while they’re studying, TV-watching, game-playing, reading, or having downtime. And the assessment continues through the night as the metrics of status pulsate through the glowing screens of their devices.
What we have in the twenty-first century with the introduction of social media is an unmanageable and unhealthy amount of assessment. Our Social Brain Networks simply can’t process it all. We propose a new term for the anxiety and suffering caused by adolescent SBNs saturated with near-constant evaluation: “assessment overload.”
Assessment overload is what evolutionary biologists call a mismatch disorder. Mismatch disorders arise from discrepancies between modern human environments and the ancient ones in which our bodies and minds evolved. The modern obesity epidemic is a mismatch disorder, arising from the differences between food-scarce environments in which human and animal metabolic systems evolved and today’s world of hyperabundant calories.
The rising levels of stress and anxiety in adolescence can perhaps also be understood as a mismatch disorder. SBNs evolved in mammalian groups with intermittent contests. The perpetual assessment in the lives of modern adolescents—the test-taking, sports performance, and now social media rankings, and so on—overwhelms SBNs, which evolved in environments with less constant evaluation. Like the hyperabundance of calories, unrelenting assessment is presumably unique to the modern human world. It is more intense and more constant than what young social animals have ever had to deal with.
STATUS SANCTUARIES
Problems emerging out of evolutionary mismatch may be best solved by re-creating a better alignment between physiology and environments. This can be done by restoring the conditions of previous environments in which the physiology (or behavior) originally evolved. In the case of obesity mismatch, it would mean paring back hyperabundant food items and restoring seasonality to modern diets. In the case of assessment overload, it means introducing assessment-free periods into an adolescent’s life. Instead of letting adolescents drown in a flood of scores and rankings, adults could be throwing them lifelines in the form of assessment-free zones, times, and places where judgments are held at bay. Instead of relaxation spots or unplugging areas, or chill zones, they could be called what all those places actually are: status sanctuaries.
Status sanctuaries—where adolescents might engage in noncompetitive sports, reading for pleasure, private moments of rest without the intrusion of social media—would allow adolescents (and their developing SBNs) to take a break from the hierarchies, the real-life ones in front of them and the virtual ones on their screens. Assessment is a normal and important part of adolescent life. Assessment overload is causing illness and distress.
Although human friends are a must, thanks to the species-spanning nature of the Social Brain Network, adolescents can also benefit from relationships with animals. Horses, dogs, cats, and other pets have sophisticated SBNs that respond to people in surprising ways. Pet therapies have grown in popularity as their benefits for human mental health become better known. As Kathy Krupa, a certified equine assisted therapist, told the New York Times:
“A horse couldn’t care less if someone has been in jail or has a learning disability. They only judge you by how you are at the moment. You’re even allowed to be afraid around a horse as long as you admit that you’re afraid. I’ve seen a horse walk right up to a terrified kid and put their heads in their chests.”
In Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization called Hand2Paw matches at-risk youth with shelter animals that are similarly vulnerable. The founder was a nineteen-year-old University of Pennsylvania student who herself was looking for social connection during her second year away at college. The social relief of human/animal interaction goes both ways. Not only do the Hand2Paw human youth volunteers gain from the program, but the homeless dogs and cats they care for receive hundreds of hours of bonding, grooming, and socialization—staving off kennel dog syndrome and making them more adoptable.
YOU’RE NOT WHERE YOU’RE SORTED
For most hyenas, Shrink’s inauspicious start would have spelled a lifetime of misery or early death from starvation or predation. But Shrink wasn’t most hyenas. He didn’t just plod along the path mapped out for him by genetics, environment, and the social order he was born into. His story took a twist with a single extraordinary decision.
One day, probably emboldened by hunger, he marched straight up to the most powerful hyena in the clan—Queen Mafuta—and asked for her help. She rebuffed him. He asked again. She turned him away again. Over and over he asked for her help until a few days later, for reasons that Oliver Höner still doesn’t completely understand, Mafuta relented. Shrink’s determination combined with Mafuta’s unusual acquiescence changed the hyena’s life.
What Shrink asked for was milk. And Mafuta gave it to him.
For weeks, Shrink and Meregesh, the prince and the pauper, nursed side by side at Mafuta’s breast. With Mafuta’s nutrient-rich milk and the plentiful quantities of it, Shrink quickly grew into a strapping and, to use Höner’s word, “handsome” hyena.
It’s extremely unusual for hyenas to adopt other youngsters. We’ll never know why Queen Mafuta finally said yes, but Höner said that she and Shrink had a special relationship driven by Shrink’s combination of charisma, social intelligence, and drive. While Shrink’s hyena charm certainly helped, his social mobility was ultimately the result of the strong coalitions he built, his grit and gumption, and, of course, luck. Perhaps most important, Höner said, Shrink knew how to spot and take opportunities when they presented themselves. His friendship walks with other males, his experiences in rough-and-tumble play and role reversals, taught him valuable social lessons for getting along with others.
From the moment he allied with Mafuta, things changed for Shrink. He got better nutrition. He associated with high-status animals. Mafuta began defending him in encounters with other clan members. Along with his social skills, these factors came together and when it was time to migrate, Shrink got into a good position in another clan. He became a popular mate and fathered many offspring. Later, Shrink dispersed again and joined a third clan. Once more, his social skills served him in the transition to a new group.
Before you think this tale has an uncomplicated happy ending, not everyone was in favor of Shrink’s rise. Changes in status sometimes require sacrifice. In this case, Shrink sacrificed his relationship with his mother to save himself. The entire time Shrink was begging, cajoling, and demanding that Mafuta adopt him, Shrink’s own mother was desperately trying to keep him from giving up on her. Beba, Höner told us, “was not super happy that Shrink went to suckle from Mafuta. She even tried to physically carry him away from Mafuta’s side. But he just kept insisting.”
Like humans throughout history who put their painful or embarrassing—or sometimes loving but unworkable—pasts behind them, Shrink sensed that his ticket to survival was tangled up in his relationship with a mother who couldn’t care well enough for him. So, he took the chance and went elsewhere.
Every day, all over the world, humans struggle with the situations they’re born into and the ones they aspire to. Just one example comes from the historian and author Tara Westover, whose 2018 memoir, Educated, describes her childhood in rural Idaho growing up as the daughter of survivalists. Because her father didn’t believe in public education, Westover attended no school until the age of seventeen, instead spending those years of her wildhood “working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife.” Determined to go to college, Westover began to teach herself, eventually graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University. A hyena’s motivations would of course be vastly different from a human’s, but, like Shrink, some of Westover’s remarkable fortitude might be attributable to temperament and outlook, including what she described to the Times of London as “[t]hings that I now recognize as just part of my personality: willfulness and assertiveness, maybe even a bit of aggressiveness.” In the same interview, she shared this opinion on family estrangement: “You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them, and you could miss someone every day and still be glad they’re not in your life.”
For Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, adolescence and adult life didn’t unfold so positively. Lacking social skills, he was unable to promote his work and ascend academic ladders. He struggled to gain recognition. And although he had pioneered the study of hierarchies in animals, he was never particularly successful at navigating the pecking orders in his own life.
Shrink’s story has many lessons about how privilege, environments, and individual agency shape the fates of human adolescents and young adults. Shrink’s life could have proceeded much in the way his mother’s did—living at the bottom of the social group, derided, harassed, deprived, endangered. But maternity isn’t always destiny. Young hyenas, and the young of many other species, sometimes take their futures into their own paws, talons, or fins.
Happy living on planet Earth requires first acknowledging a few grim realities. Level playing fields don’t exist in nature. Parental rank inheritance is real, and parents intervene to help their offspring all the time. Perceived status drives mood—and, depending on where that perception lands individuals in their groups, can make them feel anxious and depressed or connected and happy. Animals do bully one another, and adults bully adolescents, although it all can get much, much better as one grows up.
An animal’s best chance for increasing the good and blunting the harmful aspects of hierarchies is to develop social skills. While no animal can control the circumstances into which it is born, social skills are the most important tool for creating a bearable life. Strengthening them is important.
Shrink himself might say that even if you are not born a privileged creature and life at the low-status end of a den, pack, or classroom may feel terrible, status reversals are possible with practice, tenacity, and just enough of the good fortune he found in the Ngorongoro Crater.